


Everything you could

by Kes



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Gen, Non-Binary Chewbacca, Star Wars: The Force Awakens Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-10
Updated: 2016-01-10
Packaged: 2018-05-13 00:59:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5688469
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kes/pseuds/Kes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Chewie’s dropped out of the celebrations, just like Rey, just like Leia herself. They’ve retreated to a servicing bay in the main hangar, sitting on an abandoned trolley like they’ve burned themself out on grief. She sits next to them. It’s been a long, long time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Everything you could

It had been an inauspicious meeting, thirty-five years ago. Oh, they’d laughed about it for a while – the best friends are always the ones you make in firefights, said Han, looking at Chewie, and Luke ducked his head and looked sheepish. It’s been a running theme, for all of them. It hasn’t been funny for years. It’s less funny now, with one of the strands entwined that day snapped, another stretched near too far to feel, and only Chewie remaining.

Chewie’s dropped out of the celebrations, just like Rey, just like Leia herself. They’ve retreated to a servicing bay in the main hangar, sitting on an abandoned trolley like they’ve burned themself out on grief. She sits next to them. It’s been a long, long time. “You did everything you could,” she says, and wonders how many times she’s said that. Too many. Her bones are cold. “Thank you.”

Their voice is hoarse and she has nearly forgotten how to understand them, but not quite. She catches the denial of her words, their fury and confusion for the boy the four of them raised together.

“I know.” It’s a gaping chasm at the heart of her and Leia will not look down. When did grief become a routine? When the universe decided that her lot would be to watch her life explode into rubble, again and again, she supposes. Her jaw clenches. She has stared down… other griefs. She will stare this one down as well.

Chewie’s hand on her shoulder surprises her, although it shouldn’t, and she sinks gratefully into the hug. They’re enormous, a pillar of warmth, and their fur tickles her forehead. This close, she can feel them shaking, as well as feel the intake of air before they speak again. They’re talking about Han, about those last few seconds under the light of the dying star, and she has heard this from Rey but Chewie tells her all the things that the girl had no way to spot, the little tells they both know from years of watching him. She squeezes the tears back and tells them how it felt through the Force, the turbulent, erratic pulsing from the still-luminous point she knew was Ben, and the way Han’s light had faded. It seems wrong, somehow, that there had been no supernova. Chewie finds the voice to howl some more. Leia wishes humans had the same ways as Wookies, but a howl from her would feel thin, summoned, less an expression than a conscious creation.

Getting along with them has always been… easy. Easier than getting along with their partner, anyway, and she refuses to feel guilty about the thought. Trouble has always wound its fingers around her and Han, and there is no need to forget that to mourn and miss and love him. The Force surrounds the two of them, and she tries to express the fact that he is within it – but his energy is scattered the way Anakin Skywalker’s, unfortunately, is not. Even a shade-haunted man like Luke, she thinks, could not find enough of him to spin even a part of him back together. Her own use of the Force, determinedly worldly and pragmatic, certainly can’t. Chewie listens to her. They’ve heard enough about Jedi, about the Force, in their time to understand.

What comes next is the next thing they ask. She knows this, this drive for action, this restlessness that had provided fertile soil for Chewie’s friendship with Han. The seed had been the life debt. “You don’t have to stay with us,” she says, because she doesn’t know what happens when this happens. Sometimes she worries about them, worries that the life debt’s being exploited, worries that Han, Luke and her between them have dragged them into a swamp of trouble they would never have chosen on their own.

They make a slight noise that conveys a lot, tells her she’s put her foot wrong. “Oh, Chewie. We’d rather you stayed. I would rather you stay. I don’t… you’re my friend too, you know.” She reaches up around them, as far as she can, and squeezes. “I assume the Falcon goes to you. You certainly deserve her. After that, well. We find Luke – will you take Rey? He might be less skittish with a familiar face.” If she could, she would go herself, she tells herself. She’s needed here. Besides, hers might be a little too familiar. Sometimes she shares his dreams, when their nights coincide, and they are nearly as bleak as her own.

The Falcon provokes the head-nudge she knows parallels a familiar smile for a Wookie. They don’t want to take the captain’s chair, they explain. It’s too like… they use an expression that try as she might, she doesn’t understand. Dead men’s helmets, she supposes. Anyway, they suggest sending Rey as captain. Han offered her a job, they tell her, and she turned it down to return to Jakku and keep up her relentless vigil for the family that dumped her there.

“You pick up strays, don’t you?”

Their response is a slightly abashed affirmative. What must it look like, from their ancient eyes? The two of them fall silent for a moment, and then Chewie says that they don’t know what to do about Ben. One urge tells them to seek revenge. The other tells them to finish what Han died for, to bring him home.

Leia closes her eyes wearily and almost wishes she was less certain of his survival – though had he burned with the planet, he is too strong in the Force to fade into it like his father. No, this snarl she has created is and always will be hers to unravel, and if there is one thing she has never had any time for, it’s shirking her duty. “Nor me, Chewie. Nor me.”


End file.
